Crunchyroll: Watch Free Anime Online

Crunchyroll was born in 2006, hosting a mix of user submitted and site provided anime clips, many of which were uploaded without rights holders permission, although infringing videos were usually removed by site admin. Despite this somewhat bumpy start, Crunchyroll quickly gained a vast userbase, climbing into Alexa’s top 200 within 2 years of its conception, and got funded at the beginning of last year (March) by Venrock (a California based venture capital firm) to the tune of about $4 million USD.

A stricter approach to copyright infringement and the weight of their user base and a newly cut, seven figure cheque behind them meant that they were able to secure content licensing deals with Japanese providers, bringing exclusive and simulcast content over from Japan to their largely American audience. They now stream and broadcast only content to which they have legitimate license, and operate a membership program to get access to content earlier than it’s normally available for streaming, and to watch high-def versions of videos.

I think this is a great example of a site managing to turn popular appeal into a solid business model in the icanhascheezburger.com mould. Take a pretty unique type of content, build a user base, and exploit that user base hard and fast, while trimming away any hint of illegality. Skating the Web 2.0 copyright infringment maelstrom for a while might be dangerous, but once you’ve got the traffic, then you’ve got bargaining power, and if you can get some financial backing, or really get on top of your advertising proposition then the rewards can be huge.